Environmental Scan of Repositories of Clinical Research Data: How Far Have We Got With Public Disclosure of Trial Data?

Clinical research data sharing is expected to decrease the burden on research subjects, enabling more efficient and reliable research; promote innovations and entrepreneurship; and facilitate knowledge synthesis, discovery and translation that could ultimately inform clinical decision making.

Data repositories are key elements for achieving broad data sharing but in clinical research there is no repository for raw data which covers a variety of medical disciplines. Furthermore, to our knowledge there is no wide agreement on the standards, best practices and essential features of clinical data repositories.

The environmental scan aims to produce comprehensive information on the features and practices of data repositories with interests in clinical data disclosure.